BasicAttentionToken
Saturday, August 21, 2021
There are over 200+ tokens in the crypto world, but not every token has a utility. However, the ones which have a utility have the potential to replace and disrupt the system they have been created for.
BAT is one such token.
Advertising industry has come a long way from billboards to television advertising and now to social media advertising. But the advertising model has not been changed for years and thus serves useful only to a few set of people. In the existing model there is nothing for the user except for the free content which they anyways choose to skip. The advertising industry has four players -
1. User - The content consumers (you and me)
2. Publisher - Person whose content you wish to see
3. Advertiser - The person who created the advertisement
4. Platform - Serving as a middleman
The problem begins the moment you encounter a middleman in the revenue model. As a platform, Google collected $146.92 billion in advertisement revenue last year. YouTube's global advertising revenues amounted to almost $19.77 billion in 2020. These platforms have been selling the data of their users to firms, who were able to fine-tune and direct specific ads according to the user’s needs by incorporating machine language and AI. These platforms show exactly what you want to see. This is what unethical sounds like. As a user, I have nothing to gain but a lot to loose. Firstly, my privacy is being violated and attention gets diverted to unwanted and creepy advertisements. Secondly, a user has no incentives to watch those advertisements.
Consider it like this -
You wish to buy a laptop and hence you are doing all the research and exploring about different laptops. The next very moment you see advertisements relating to laptop in every page you browse on the internet.
1. I AM PAYING FOR THE LAPTOP
2. MY PRIVACY IS AT STAKE
3. MY ATTENTION GOES TO UNWANTED ADVERTISEMENTS.
Not only the users, even advertisers and publishers can’t effectively monetize their advertisements since the platforms take a chunk of their earnings. There is a 45/55 split for all content creators, so Google keeps 45 percent of all YouTube advertising on your videos, and you get the remaining 55 percent.
To cut short - The system is in dire need of overhaul.
How does Basic Attention Token (BAT) comes into the picture?
BAT is a digital advertising token which eliminates the need of a middleman and connects users, advertisers and publishers in a decentralized way using the Brave browser. Users get rewarded for their attention.
The Brave browser blocks all the unneeded ads and trackers by default. Compare the same webpage when 1. Opened on Chrome, 2. Opened on Brave
Features of Brave browser:
1. Privacy: The browser automatically blocks all third-party trackers and the user’s browsing data is kept completely private.
2. Incentives: Users get rewarded for their attention. You can earn upto $60 - $70 annually just by watching ads.
The users have an incentive to switch to Brave, but what about the advertisers and publishers? A significant number of people around the globe have started using Adblockers and they are a bane in the advertising industry. Advertisements are the biggest source of revenue for advertisers and publishers, and if people start using Adblockers - advertisers and publishers will go bankrupt.
How does BAT fix this?
By economically incentivizing users to view ads and using their decentralized machine learning platform to show users the exactly the kind of ads they want to see will make sure that the advertiser’s ads are not gone to waste. Publishers on the other hand have a lot to gain. If you are a youtube content creator, you might know how exactly youtube eats up most of the earnings. When it comes to handing out royalties, YouTube is extremely stingy. However Youtube gets lots of views and new users in return of all the hard work done by the publishers. How unfair the system is! BAT can be the broken bridge between the three main pillars of advertising. It has the potential to disrupt the digital advertising which would be fair for all the three members of the ecosystem. In a way Brave is helping you monetize your own data.
Interesting Trivia!
Do you know who is the founder of BRAVE?
BRENDAN EICH - The brain behind JavaScript. JavaScript brought the era of dynamic websites, until then websites used to be only static.
So what do you do when the asset is undervalued??
GO LONG ON IT
“The real trick in highly reliable systems is somehow to achieve simultaneous centralisation & decentralisation.”
See you next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
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What a beautiful idea and a beautiful explanation!